Spirituality—the source of health and healing

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If you’re looking for practical spirituality, this is it. Marian answers a variety of questions ranging from how to pray about the AIDS epidemic, to praying about male hair loss, a facial growth, an irregular heartbeat and issues of aging--especially in relation to eyesight. She also goes into the spiritual qualities that forward healing. She says, “Spirituality is another word for Christliness. It’s the power outlet that connects us to the inexhaustible source of spiritual healing, which is God.”

In this chat you’ll hear her answer many more heartfelt questions, including those about how much spirituality one needs in order to be healed, how a spiritual approach heals the body, and why spiritual healing is important to Christian Science.

spirituality.com host: Hello everyone. Welcome to another spirituality.com live question and answer audio event. My name is Rosalie Dunbar and I’ll be your host for the next hour. Today’s topic is, “Spirituality: the source of health and healing,” and our guest is Marian English, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science in Colorado Springs, Colorado. But she’s actually traveled the world speaking at health-care facilities, prisons, detention centers, and homeless shelters. She’s also written articles for the magazines you can sample or subscribe for on our website. [Description of how to send questions]

In case you’ve just joined us, our topic is, “Spirituality: the source of health and healing,” and our guest is Marian English, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science from Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Marian, do you have some thoughts to get us started?

Marian: Well, actually I do, Rosalie. Spirituality is just a headline word for me, and I’m delighted to be talking about it today. It begins wherever we are. For instance, there’s a passage in the Bible that I’ve always loved so much. I’m paraphrasing it, but it talks about whatever is true and honest and just, things that are pure and lovely—simple, ordinary things, and then it says, keep your thoughts focused on these things. To me, that’s the simplest meaning of spirituality, choosing right thoughts, spiritual qualities, one by one.

Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy emphasizes the divine nature or the spirituality of Christ Jesus. How he used that to heal and what that means to us today. It states in part, “. . . it was this spirituality which enabled Jesus to heal the sick, cast out evil, and raise the dead” (p. 51). So it’s not how many words you know, it’s the spirituality behind them, that gives power to the words.

Spirituality is the high road to self-discovery. God made man in His image and likeness and we never have to improve what God has done. But we do need to improve our understanding of what He’s done. I’ve found there’s no end to all the spiritual qualities that enrich our own spirituality. And I’ve caught a glimpse of the satisfaction that reaches us on a very deep level. Paul mentioned it when he said that to be spiritually-minded is life and peace. And I’ve found that there’s no end to the great blessings it brings across the whole range of human experience—from health to happiness, financial security to career choices and purpose, love for one another, freedom from fear and suffering—we all yearn for that for everyone. Spirituality is another word for Christliness. It’s the power outlet that connects us to the inexhaustible source of spiritual healing, which is God.

Now, what I hope you gain from this chat today is how close spirituality is to you, how available it is to you. And maybe we can talk about some of these ideas that makes it practical to us today.

spirituality.com host: Well, that sounds just wonderful, Marian, and I’m so glad we have a lot of questions and so it’s wonderful to be able to have this experience together. Our first question is from Butch who is writing from the USA, and Butch asks: “How much spirituality does one need in order to be healed? In other words, if one is working diligently, hourly, in Christian Science to be healed, but finds himself at this point in time relying on medicine in order to stay alive, is it humanly or spiritually possible to experience a complete healing through his prayers, or will the taking of medicine prevent this? If you were this individual, how would you metaphysically work, that is pray, on this?

Marian: Well, that’s a long question and I’ll try to keep my answer as brief as possible, but it’s a good question, Butch, and I appreciate the question. When Jesus was giving his instructions about his teachings for us, that enable us to heal, remember what he said about that mustard seed? He said, just a grain of mustard seed, you don’t have to be long, long experienced in these ideas. My gosh, when I began to read Science and Health, I began to have healings right away, just from the new ideas that were coming to me. And I had been used to medical attention all my life at the time. But I found that as I progressed in my spiritual understanding that the medication wasn’t doing me any good, and it fell away.

I know this, Butch, that if you seem to have been working for a long time on something, never give up because God is with you wherever you are. You always have the privilege and the power of being with Him. He’s always with you. He never abandons you. And take whatever understanding you have of God, know that you are loved by Him, and know that that understanding is a great power to you. Material medicine really doesn’t prevent a healing. It can’t prevent and it can’t sponsor a healing. But when your faith is in God and not the material medicine, that faith is answered with power and goodness and with success. That’s what I’ve found to be true in my own experience.

spirituality.com host: Thanks. Now, this is a more global question from Julie in Bellevue, Washington. She asks: Please give some ideas on how to pray about the worldwide epidemic of AIDS.

Marian: Wow, Julie, that is a good question. When I’m praying about something that seems quite formidable, what I do is start with God. In fact, when I’m praying about anything, I’ll start with God. Is there anything God cannot do? Is there anything that the purity of the divine nature, cannot reach? Why, if we start from God and know that we are working not with just the hope that it’ll heal something, but with a universal law—I call it the law of likeness, just for a shorthand way of helping myself understand it—when we start there and with purity of man as His image and likeness, it makes whatever we look at, a little bit less like Goliath and more like one more opportunity to express the great power of God to heal.

Jesus, remember, healed leprosy and that was the fear in those days. In fact, he healed ten at once, at one time. Let’s know that we can heal these things if we start with God, for with God all things are possible. In fact, the very first sentence in Science and Health in the first chapter on Prayer, the first idea of healing that comes to us is that healing results from: “. . . absolute faith that all things are possible to God.” When I get a case like that that seems very serious, then I start with God and find out the only real power is God.

spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. You mentioned something called “the law of likeness,” if I understood you correctly. Do you mean the law that we’re made in God’s image and likeness?

Marian: I do, Rosalie. And that’s a term that’s quite unique with me, I’m sure. I use the term, “the law of likeness” because we’re working not with faith healing in Christian Science. We’re working with law. And that law—it comes from what Jesus gave us—to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And he taught us to see the perfect man, and that law of likeness is what the perfect man is. What God is, man reflects. What the original has, the likeness has to be, so I just call it the law of likeness.

spirituality.com host: That’s a lovely idea. I just wanted to make sure I understood, that’s all.

Marian: Glad you did.

spirituality.com host: Now, this is June from St. Petersburg, Florida and she says: How much of an obstruction to spirituality is hypocrisy? How can we discern hypocrisy in our own thought or the thought of those we would see as spiritual ideas and cast out?

Marian: Well I would say that hypocrisy tries to be a big obstruction, but there is no obstruction to God. He’s universal and He’s the only thing that’s going on right now. But if we allow our thoughts to be opposing the words that we choose, we can say that we’re loving God with all our hearts and while at the same time our thoughts are kind of not liking what He has made very well, that guy over there that I don’t agree with. Those are the kinds of things that hypocrisy feeds on. What it can do is it can prevent the individual from making progress in his understanding. What God does—you see, God works from the inside out, so it’s sincerity, simplicity, and absolute honesty. What we speak, our hearts need to feel.

spirituality.com host: I love that statement. That’s so helpful. Now, this listener from North Carolina has an interesting question. He says, I know no problems are too big or too small for Christian Science treatment. But one supposedly incurable disease I haven’t heard addressed before is male hair loss. Sometimes it seems too superficial or vain to pray about something like this. But I feel in my heart that the belief in baldness shouldn’t be accepted any more than other false beliefs, even if society takes it for granted. Can this be addressed spiritually or is it simply too materialistic to want to look better?

Marian: What was the name of this questioner, Rosalie?

spirituality.com host: It didn’t give a name.

Marian: OK. That’s OK. It’s just a really interesting question because I remember an experience in Mrs. Eddy’s life when she suddenly began to lose all her hair. She prayed about it. And she said the answer that came to her was, “Every hair of your head is numbered” which she thought made hair quite important because it was the spiritual idea behind it that was so important. I don’t think that’s at all outside the realm of prayer. In fact, I’ll say this: Whatever engages your attention is something that you need to pray about. Do something prayerful about whatever engages your attention, even if it’s the loss of hair. If it’s coming from the self-focus that wants to look really good all the time, you might want to change your thought about that. If it’s coming from a desire to present the beauty of Soul and the completeness of Mind—which are synonyms for God—if it’s coming from that direction, then why not pray about it? And why not prove that “with God all things are possible”? It’s been done before.

spirituality.com host: You know, I was just thinking that Mrs. Eddy was probably thinking of Jesus’ own statement that “even the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Luke 12:7). I think it’s the part where Jesus is talking about the fact that God even sees a sparrow fall, so that each of us is valued and even the hairs of your head are all numbered. I think that’s in the Sermon on the Mount.

Marian: I think it is too, and I think that that is what’s behind that statement. I don’t think he was talking, necessarily, about hair. He was giving the point that even the minutiae in our lives, even the little things in our lives. I’ve found that true in my own experience and with my family, even the little things. It’s OK—it’s OK to pray about them and to expect the very best from God.

spirituality.com host: Now Josh is writing from Southwest England and he says: I’ve been studying Christian Science for over ten years and would like to be more active in sharing Christian Science through the public practice of spiritual healing. Can you provide some insights from your own experience on how we get started in the public practice of Christian Science?

Marian: Oh, I love this one, Josh. This is a great question. I’ll tell you briefly how I started. I said, “Father, I’m willing. You don’t have to send me a note, signed God, to get me started here. I’m willing to do this work, to be about my Father’s business. And if it’s not a good idea, You’ll head me off, and if it is, You’ll remove the stones.” That was my starting point.

And then I decided to open my thought, to give my consent to the fact that God, through His Christ, is the healer, and I’m just a window, but I keep my window clean so that I can help people through God and His Christ. And then I set up my office in my dining room. Our family of three children and several dogs and cats and a husband—all of those things—we hardly ever ate in the dining room. So it was the quietest room in the house and that’s where my office was. I spent an hour there a day, praying, and giving treatment to the world. Nobody called me during that time. But they did start calling me the other parts of the day. And from there it just grew until it became a very fulfilling Christian Science practice.

And Josh, start from wherever you are and just take a case. We’ve got a world that needs healing. I don’t mean talk to people who haven’t asked you to pray. And I don’t mean proselytizing or trying to persuade them to call you. And I certainly don’t mean praying for somebody to get sick so they’ll call you. What I do mean is start wherever your thought is and say, “Father, I’m willing. Show me how to go.” And He will.

spirituality.com host: Thanks. Anne from Delaware, Ohio says: Is being humble needed for healing? How can I be humble?

Marian: Oh, my dear, what a good—I love that thought, being humble. You know, humility is not putting yourself down. Humility is really letting the Christ raise you up. Humility is—it’s an escalator, to me, that shows you who you really are. It’s that self-discovery I was talking about earlier. Sometimes we have to be very humble in order to help ourselves to understand that my identity, my strength, my ability, starts not from a human brain, calling itself “me”—not from a human body, calling itself “me.” It starts from God. And as I’m humble enough to admit that, Yeah, I can do nothing without God and His Christ, that humility is leading me upward to a higher sense of purpose and a higher sense of what I can do. We never need to think that we’re the healers. It’s God who’s the healer and humility tells us that. Humility also tells us that because I find my whole intelligence and understanding and life in God, that humility is going to give me success.

The definition of man in the Glossary of Science and Health includes the phrase that man is “the full representation of Mind” (p. 591). That right there gives us a deep humility, to know that we are representing God and His Christ. Even Jesus said, “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30). But look what he did. He healed sick, he healed even disease supposed to be incurable, he raised the dead, he stilled storms, he fed thousands with a few loaves of bread and some fish. Think of what that humility did. I can of myself—the eldest son of a Hebrew family, a Jewish carpenter—I can do nothing. But through Christ he changed the world.

spirituality.com host: That’s lovely. Now we have another Anne. This is Annie from Maine. She says: I am committed to spiritual healing for a specific issue but it’s on my face or seems to be. I’m starting to feel isolated as I hesitate to go out. Any thoughts on cultivating poise during this time?

Marian: Yes, I do have some thoughts on that from my own experience. In a couple of instances I’ve seen growths on the skin fall away. That’s your priority, knowing that as you make progress, anything that is unlike God and His Christ have to fall away from you. Then when we deal with others in social settings, for instance, or just out in the public, we spare them from anything that would startle them or make them feel uncomfortable. We keep anything that is unlike God covered and spare others of having to see it. But that’s not hiding it. We’re not in the business of hiding anything. We’re simply protecting others. When we have to go out, and we have something that is not as pleasant to look at as we would like it to be, what we’re doing is protecting others, and we’re also knowing that we don’t have to carry this with us. We’re carrying the beauty of Soul.

In a couple of instances in my own experience I had a growth on my face and because of my understanding of what Christian Science is teaching—that man is the reflection of God, and God would have to have a growth on His face for me to have one on mine in that context—then I had to look at that growth and say, It’s not even there. It sure looks like it is. But it’s not. Not if I understand who I am. So the key is understanding your real identity as the expression of God’s being. And since God is the beauty of Soul, that expression has to be beautiful. That’s what heals it. And that’s what you’re after.

The other experience I had with a growth was on my arm, and I’d had a particularly hard summer. Everything had gone wrong. If you’ve ever had a summer like that where so many things were going wrong, and each time something went wrong in my experience that was hard to live with, I simply knew that there was no opposite to God. In Christian Science, we call it handling animal magnetism—that’s the term. But the fact is, the simplicity of that is, I was just realizing that there’s only one power and that’s the power of good. And each time something bad would happen, I would know that the power of good supersedes any sense of bad happening. And then this growth on my arm suddenly began to grow. Overnight it had doubled in size. I got so used to handling things that were bad as knowing that they weren’t from God, therefore they had no power, that I looked at that growth and I said, “Don’t you give me any trouble. I’ve got enough to do.” And I dismissed it. It had been there for quite some time. In a couple of days, it was gone. When I cleaned the area, it was just as pure as could be.

It’s been several years and it’s never happened again. I thought, What in the world could have healed from that kind of a thought?—“Don’t you give me any trouble. I’ve got enough to do.” The thought was, I dismissed it. I didn’t worry about it, I didn’t fear it, I wasn’t self-conscious about it. I dismissed it. And Science and Health tells us—gives us the authority for that. It says we can dismiss something like that because it’s illegitimate—it doesn’t have a father. We dismiss it. So it was that dismissal that did the healing work.

spirituality.com host: That sounds wonderful. And this is a question from Geraldine from Florida. It’s a question I had when I was new in my study of Christian Science, so I understand where she’s coming from. She says: I understand that in Christian Science there’s a huge focus placed on healing. How do you explain the significance of healing in light of spirituality?

Marian: The focus in Christian Science is on worshiping God. Healing is a fringe benefit. Spirituality is what we cultivate. Spirituality is something we work out all the time. We’re about our Father’s business when we are cultivating our spirituality—those spiritual qualities of—oh gosh, they’re infinite. They come from God. Think of the spiritual qualities Love has—compassion, gentleness, goodness. Think of the spiritual qualities of Mind, another synonym for God—intelligence, understanding. That’s what we’re cultivating. Then along in the human experience comes something that is so ungodlike and feels so uncomfortable that you know that a good God would not send it, anymore then a good parent would make his child suffer. And there you get an opportunity to put in to practice what you’ve been doing and that is cultivating the Christliness or the spiritual qualities that constitute spirituality. So, I look at it sometimes like they’re in arithmetic problems. You’ve got the law that keeps numbers together and shows you how they go together, but you need to practice them sometimes in order to really learn the principle of math. Same thing as here. We’ve got the law of God and His Christ, a universal law of Love, and every once in a while we have a human experience that enables us to put those things into practice. But it’s that spiritual progress, that spirituality, that is our focus, our priority.

spirituality.com host: Well, and I can just add from my own experience, briefly, that I found that as I studied Science and Health (because during those early days I wanted to read Science and Health every minute) that a lot of things that were in my life that were troubling to me, they just vanished, because I was moving forward mentally into a more spiritual frame of reference and those things just went away. It was amazing. It was just an amazing time of growth and development, but it did stem from changing the way I thought about myself. Just to give a quick example, when I used to wake up in the morning my first thoughts would be, “What part of me is aching?” After I began reading Science and Health I never thought that anymore. But if I thought anything at all it was: “Thank you, God, for this day,” or something like that. That continues to be much more typical of my thinking than I ever did when I was in that pre-Christian Science state.

Marian: Yeah. Thank you for that, Rosalie. It parallels mine when I first began to study Science and Health in my early twenties. I worked in a radio station and I also was working as a jazz musician in nightclubs and I had developed a smoking habit. I thought nothing of opening Science and Health and lighting up a cigarette. One night during this time as I was making huge spiritual progress—at least it felt like thatat the time because these ideas that were coming to me from Science and Health were so uplifting and they were answering questions I had had all my life. One night about midnight I woke out of a sound sleep with a terrific urge to get up and smoke a cigarette. And I thought, Now what can make me get out of this warm bed, put my feet on a cold floor, stay all by myself in a dark apartment, and smoke a cigarette? What does that book say? (referring to Science and Health). And it was telling me to look to the Bible to find out who I was. And the Bible told me that God gave dominion to His image and likeness. That would be me. He didn’t give dominion to an addiction. And I thought, Well, isn’t that nice? And I turned over and went back to sleep and I never smoked again, nor wanted to. The healing was that quick, but it was almost incidental to what I was learning, You triggered it when you said that as you were making spiritual progress these things fell away. They did. Just like the Israelites when they made spiritual progress out of slavery, slavery fell away.

spirituality.com host: Right. Excellent. Now this is Amina from London and she says: Some people seem to have a lot of wealth, nice home, etc., but don’t seem particularly to be expressing good qualities of thought. And yet other people seem so humble and good and yet are living in poverty. How is this? I know that’s a little off our subject but I wondered if you wanted to take a swing at it?

Marian: Well, sure, I’ll take a swing at it. I don’t think it matters how much money you do have or you don’t have because God is the uppermost part of your desires to go forward. I do know this: that God is not poverty-minded. As we do go forward, He’s not leading us into deeper poverty but out of it. I do know this: that money really is not a great satisfaction. It does seem like it, doesn’t it? Many people wish they would win the lottery and then they could have unlimited money to go out and buy things. But I’m wondering if that really would make happiness, because I’ve seen in society in which gambling is pretty popular today and I’ve seen people who have won the lottery and it seems their mind hasn’t changed. They’ve got a lot of money but they still have the same mind-set and it has not changed their lives for the better. In fact, it many times changes it for the worse.

It’s kind of like Sophie Tucker—she was an entertainer—and she said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” Well, you know, I can kind of agree with that. But the fact is, it’s not going to make us happy. Real happiness begins with our understanding, our connection with God. Rich or poor, we can understand our connection with God. In fact, in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, she said: “If you wish to be happy . . . .” Now how would you finish that statement? “Go win the lottery”? I don’t think so. “If you wish to be happy,” she said, “argue . . . on the side of happiness; . . . You are the attorney for the case, and will win or lose according to your plea” (Christian Healing, p. 10). So it is not a matter of gaining a lot of more matter. It’s a matter of gaining more God. It’s the Christ that we gain that means the most to us, and that’s what brings a deep, deep happiness and satisfaction that nothing else can fill. It isn’t that I’m speaking against money.

spirituality.com host: That’s great. Andy from Maryland is asking—well, he sort of has a little commentary here—spiritual study has become such an important part of my life but the past year or so I feel I’m stuck on a plateau. I might have a few days where I really set aside a lot of time to study and pray but then the next day I might find myself going back to previous ways of thinking, much more negative or materialistic. How can I break out of this cycle and stop feeling like I’m fighting with myself all the time?

Marian: Well, Christian Science says, “. . . the warfare with oneself is grand” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 118). I think we all kind of relate to that, Andy. But the fact is, I think that as we watch, how many times did Jesus say, “Watch”? How many times does Christian Science teach us to “Watch”? In fact there’s a page in Science and Health that says: “Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously” (p. 392). The idea is to watch what we’re thinking. I have found that spirituality is increasing in my human experience in proportion as I watch my thought. And I’ve also found that it’s a very healing thing to do—to watch what you’re thinking. Watch what you let in. If you let in the old ways of thinking—worry, doubt and fear and maybe just idle thinking about nothing in particular—that’s the kind of life that it will bring out. You’re letting all the wrong things live in your own thought rent-free. But, if you will watch your thinking, you will find that it is increasing your spirituality, and your spirituality will be increasing everything that you hold dear. Everything that means something to you—your happiness, your relationships, your success—everything that means something to you will be increased by your understanding of God, and that’s spirituality.

spirituality.com host: That’s great. Ginny from Bellevue—this is a little bit of a related question, almost—she says: How does one keep one’s consciousness constantly tuned to reality?

Marian: I found that every day when I am just going about the business of the day, I find that every time I realize that my thought isn’t as spiritual as I’d like it to be—and by that I don’t mean some zombie walking around with my eyes closed. I simply mean a way of life. When I find that my thought isn’t quite as uplifted as I would like it to be, every time I exchange fear and replace it with love, I’m praying for myself. Every time I refuse to worry about something and instead begin to pray about a solution to it, I’m praying for myself. I’m telling you this, I guess, Ginny, that prayer for yourself is so important. Prayer for yourself every single day—it’s not selfish. In fact, it’s an essential way of beginning your day. Give yourself a break. Pray for yourself to know that you are dealing with the human experience from the standpoint of your identity with God.

Jesus had to do that. In the wilderness, he had three temptations, but there was another one there. If you’re the son of God, the voice came in the wilderness—now he was alone in the wilderness, so you know that those were thoughts coming to him. If you’re the son of God, do this. If you’re the son of God, do that. If you’re the son of God—that continual doubt that I was the son of God. And when he answered the temptations, it was from the standpoint of his true identity as the son of God. He knew who he was. And he said, My job is to serve God, nothing else but to serve God. I think that’s the way we can set the tone for our days, Jenny.

We can so establish the goodness, the joy, and the peace of God in our own thought at the very beginning of the day, that when the thoughts come to us that are unlike God, we will recognize them immediately and will exchange them for that which is from God. They tell me that bank tellers who deal with bills, money, all the time—they tell me that they’re trained to recognize the real. They’re never trained to try to recognize the counterfeit. They’re trained so thoroughly to recognize a real bill that they will recognize the false, the counterfeit, when they see it. The same thing is true of thinking. We train ourselves with spirituality to be so aware of what spiritual, good, right thoughts are, that we will recognize the imposters, and we won’t let them in.

spirituality.com host: Thank you. This is from Moira in Kingston-upon-Thames in Greater London in the UK. She says we’re told to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind. I can see what loving with our heart and mind means, but what does it mean to love with all our soul?

Marian: Good question, Moira. There is a synonym for God of Soul. But to us in the human experience, soul means spiritual sense—a sense of spiritual things, a sense of things that maybe the material senses don’t see, a sense of God’s presence and the presence of His Christ, a sense of goodness, even when the material eyes are seeing bad stuff, a sense of the truth even when the material eyes are seeing a lie. To love God with all your spiritual sense, to me, means to take every idea that comes to my thought, give it a spiritual spin, and be grateful. Love God for providing that. Love God with all your heart, all of your spiritual sense, and everything you’ve got. Love God. And why? Because that spiritual sense is the one thing in our thoughts that introduce us to God. That’s our connection. It’s a spiritual sense that connects us with what really is, that the eyes don’t see.

Here’s a very simple analogy and it’s an old one but it’s still a goody. The eyes see a flat earth and for centuries people believed that the earth was flat. And they were afraid that they’d fall off, so it prevented them from making progress—they might fall off, from finding new fishing grounds—they might fall off. But what happened? Did God intervene and make the earth round for us? Or did that sense of what was really true about the earth kick in, and through education they found out what the earth really was, and they were no longer afraid of it?

As we understand more about God through spiritual education, which is spirituality, then we begin to love that sense that is feeding us, that is telling us that God is with us. He’s not a far-off God. God is right here and right now and my spiritual sense introduces me to that. Oh, and I love it! So do you!

spirituality.com host: Deena from central Florida says: Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and yet we are admonished that self-love is inappropriate. How do we distinguish between loving ourselves and self-love in order to love our neighbor correctly?

Marian: This is an excellent question. I love this question because it’s one that is a very logical one and has a very simple answer. In Christian Science we learn that the story of Adam and Eve—remember, in the Bible?—is an analogy, it’s a myth. And it explains that human sense of self where one son kills the other son and the wife is criticized by the husband and the wife needs—it’s a dysfunctional family! And it is a false sense of self to see ourselves that way. In fact, Science and Health goes so far as to call it “the adamant of error” (see p. 242)—a very strong, but imagined, mistake about ourselves. So, the adamant of error is self-love. But when Jesus was talking about loving God first, and loving our neighbor as ourselves, he wasn’t talking about the selfish kind of love that focuses on one’s self and loves one’s self. He was talking about love the self that God made—in our neighbor and in ourselves. Love that Christly, divine nature in our neighbor and in ourselves. Put God first so we’ll know that divine nature, and then love your neighbor as yourself. In fact, I have found that I have to learn to love myself before I can love my neighbor. But it’s that true, God-created, God-ordained self that I love.

spirituality.com host: That’s great. Now I have two questions here that are eye-related and I’ll read you the first one and then the second one. The first one is from someone who hasn’t given his or her name from Denver. The person says: I understand that a practitioner cannot work for you if you’re also relying on material remedies. So what about those of us who wear eyeglasses? That’s question number one. And then the second one is from Floyd in Ohio and he says: Do you have any thoughts about healing eyesight problems attributed to aging?

Marian: Yes, they certainly are related and I appreciate both questions. To the questioner in Denver: Do you expect those eyeglasses to heal your eyes? I don’t think so. I think you expect the eyeglasses to help you see while you’re working out the problem. As a practitioner, at least in my experience, I do take cases of people who are using eyeglasses temporarily. But if they are depending on those eyeglasses to heal something, that’s the first thing that needs to be healed. The glass is not going to heal anything. The very sense of vision has to do the healing work, and then you can lay aside the glasses.

In fact, the very first healing I experienced in Christian Science was one of vision. I had worn glasses every waking moment since I was a seven-year-old girl. When I began to hear those ideas coming from Science and Health about God’s presence and His love for me, I kind of felt the fear melt away and I didn’t even know I’d been afraid. I was in my early twenties at this time and had always worn glasses, but when that fear fell away I though, “You know, I can’t see very well, I’m going to take my glasses off and see if I can’t read better without them.” And I could. I didn’t realize that that had been a healing. But as the fear fell away, the vision was healed. I do find myself using reading glasses now, at this point, many, many decades later.

And one morning she called her whole household in to her room and she called for a Christian Science Monitor, the daily newspaper, and she read the fine print without her glasses. She was just delighted with this proof of scientific healing because she said that in her work for her vision—and she never gave up on that work for vision. In her work, she suddenly realized that the Christ is always saying “Receive thy sight” just like Jesus said to those people thousands of years ago, “Receive thy sight.” And she said, All I have to do is receive it. Well, sometimes it’s that simple, it’s maybe not that easy. But there is nothing that the mortal mind can throw at us that isn’t healable through spirituality.

spirituality.com host: Thank you. Now Pearl from Eugene, Oregon seems to be asking a follow-up question. Remember, we talked about the issue of growths on people’s faces and so on and this one says: Is God Spirit, or is He with a face that could have a growth? Is God physical?

Marian: That’s a good comment because we know for certain and the Bible states it in no uncertain terms, that God is not physical. “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). God is Spirit itself and everything that He makes is spiritual. Therefore, a growth, for it to be from God would have to be a spiritual growth. And the only spiritual growth there is, is growth in spirituality. It’s not a physical thing.

spirituality.com host: All right, thank you. This is an interesting little question that’s a little bit off the subject, but I’m wondering if you would like to try it? It’s Andre from Claygate, Surrey, in the United Kingdom. He says: If you have time, I cannot accept that Jesus healed only the man with 38 years and just left all the others—I think he’s talking about the man at the pool of Bethesda who had been there for 38 years and the man was healed when Jesus approached him and saw that he really just needed to be healed. He didn’t need to go down into the pool when it was particularly receptive to healing, so to speak. I’m just condensing that story very quickly. What’s your thought on that?

Marian: Well, Andre, I stumbled over that one, too. Why did he heal just that one and then apparently nobody else there got healed? I look at it this way—this is my answer to it, you might have a better answer, but this is my answer to it. This was a primitive kind of place that you might call a primitive hospital. All these people were there—the sick, the halt, the maimed. And they were all waiting for the waters to move—for an angel to move the waters, that was the superstition, and whoever jumps in the water first gets healed. And he just couldn’t get healed because he couldn’t get to the water fast enough. Do you realize that when Jesus goes in to this place, he talks to this man who’d been unable to move for 38 years and he needed someone to move him? Thirty-eight years he’d been there. And Jesus said to the man: “Wilt thou be made whole?” (John 5:6). And the man, surprisingly, didn’t say, “Yes, I want to be healed.” What he said was an excuse why he couldn’t be healed. He said, I don’t have anybody that can take me down to the water when it moves. So for 38 years he’d waited.

I feel that Jesus was marking the way for us. He was experimenting by showing us what we can do and maybe what we can’t do. He didn’t heal anybody else there, I feel, because he felt that they were in a mental state that was so used to hanging around and finding excuses why they couldn’t be healed, that he went elsewhere and he found people who were eager and ready to jump and leap and walk. He healed that one case, but there’s no record of him going in to that place or a similar place again. I think he was telling us that people who were leaning on material methods, even if it’s a superstition, even if it’s a pool of water, let them have their own convictions and go where the healing is. This is something that stimulates us and makes us eager, not just to feel better, but eager, to heal the thought about it. And also, notice, Andre, when he was healing, he often said, take up thy bed, walk, and that may just mean, you know, a bed was simply a pad like a bedroll a cowboy in the West uses today, just roll it up and take it with you. But to me it had a little bit deeper meaning, and it’s the same idea. He often said, Take up thy bed and walk, and to me, he was saying to me, Take up your bed of excuses why you can’t be healed. Roll it up so you can’t lie on it any more. And simply walk—be healed. I think that’s what he was saying to that fellow, too. But he did not remain in that place. He went elsewhere.

spirituality.com host: That’s a wonderful thought and it sort of ties in with what you said about eyesight where you said about the Christ saying, “Receive thy sight”—that willingness to be healed. We’ve had a number of questions about people who have been praying over long-term difficulties and have not been able to receive healing. I’m going to read you one but for all of you who’ve asked this question we’re going to just do this one and it will give you some ideas for this particular thing because there’ve just been a number of them. This is Mary from Stamford, Connecticut. She says: I’ve experienced many great demonstrations through prayer in Christian Science over the years but seem to reach stumbling blocks when it comes to physical problems. I’ve not been able to reach the point in prayer when I really expect the healing to take place when it comes to the body. I’ve worked with a practitioner for years concerning a problem that I have had for about twelve years and would suspect medical science would consider very serious. How can I get over this belief that I cannot be healed spiritually of this problem, especially as it seems to have existed for so long?

Marian: Every case is different. I do recognize the need for us to understand that sickness in whatever form it appears, even scary forms, is not from God. That’s the first thing we need to recognize. God did not send sickness to teach us a lesson. He knows nothing of it and did not send it to us. But He does know our being, He does know our health, He does know us. And He keeps us in Mind and that Mind has a capital M because it stands for God’s nature. He keeps us in Mind all the time. So when we have something that doesn’t belong to us, and it just seems to hang on and on and on, we can find out, number one, that it doesn’t belong to us.

There was a time when I had a situation—it didn’t deal with a physical problem, it was a financial problem—and I was praying really, really, diligently. And I was spinning my wheels. I wasn’t getting anyplace. Here’s what happened. When I’d start to pray, I would start with “Our Father” like the Lord’s Prayer does and a half hour later I’d find that I was going around and around with the problem. I’d left “Our Father.” Now when this happens, it’s no longer prayer, now it’s worry. We can watch our prayers. Are our prayers staying with our Father? It’s kind of like I say often, the old saying, Veni, vidi, vici—I came, I saw, I conquered. It’s got a new spin on it today. It’s” Veni, vidi, velcro—came, saw, stuck with it. Sometimes we need to stick with our Father. And when I wasn’t making any headway at all in the situation that was very serious to me, I had decided that I needed to change my prayer. I wasn’t able to stay with our Father. Once again, this is under the category of handling animal magnetism. Animal magnetism in Christian Science is a term for anything that is unlike God. It is that mental pull away from the truth of God to the belief that the mistaken view of man is real. The mental pull away. And some times it will pull us away and we don’t even realize it’s done it. It will pull us away from the absolute perfection of perfect God, perfect man to the belief that it’s perfect God, OK, but I’m not the perfect man, I’m very imperfect. That’s animal magnetism and we need to handle it.

So my prayer changed. I was no longer dealing with the thing that I thought needed healing. Now I prayed, “Father, just show me how to stick with You mentally. How do I do that without being pulled away and I don’t even know when it’s happening?” And immediately that prayer was answered. God answers our prayers through giving us ideas. We need to listen for those ideas. And the idea was from Psalms 46:1: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Well, I was in trouble and I needed help, and I needed it now. So I thought, All right, God is my refuge and I’m going to take those seven major synonyms that Christian Science gives us to help us understand God’s nature. Those synonyms are: Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, and Principle, meaning law. I took one at a time and I simply stayed with that until I began to understand a little more clearly that God was with me. And that was the beginning of the healing.

There’s one more answer to that question—which I know is an important question to many people. And that was my own experience. I’d had a physical problem that had gone on for a couple of years and it was a life-threatening one. It was a problem of hemorrhaging, very severe hemorrhaging. I learned many lessons along the way. Each one I thought, OK, here’s my healing. And it wasn’t. But it was a lesson that I needed. It was just marvelous lessons along the way. And to this day I still rely on those lessons that I learned. But you know what the final lesson was? The lesson that really brought that healing home to me? It was learning how to think about myself. It was a lesson in self-discovery. Every time I thought of myself as a sick woman, praying about it, I was abandoning God’s own likeness. God’s likeness is not a sick woman praying about it. God’s likeness is the male and female of His creating—absolutely perfect. And it was that standard of perfect God, perfect man that my thought needed to reach. I didn’t need to be deceived by the appearance of my body. I needed to focus on where my thought was. And when I did, the healing came. And it came overnight.

spirituality.com host: I would just like to add that some people tend to identify with the problem, too, sort of almost look for it. That is something like you were saying about really affirming your spirituality in that you are not a sick woman but the idea of God or something like that. Whenever you find yourself thinking about yourself as the person with a problem or a growth or whatever, to just really reaffirm your spiritual nature right away and to try to discipline your thought to do that.

Marian: Indeed. When you disengage that problem from your identity, you’re disengaging it from your body. And whenever I get a call from someone and they talk about “my problem” I know that’s the thing that we need to talk about.

spirituality.com host: Yep. Now we have lots and lots of questions, so we’re going to run fifteen minutes past the time. We may not get to everyone’s question but we will try to answer classes of questions so that all of you will get an answer to a part of your question. This is one from Mary Rose from Bellevue. She says: How would you initially approach a person who was receiving intensive medical treatment for the claim of a visible terminal disease and who knows nothing about Christian Science?

Marian: Before I even approach an individual who’s having a physical problem and is under medical care, I first handle my own thought. We have the right to do something prayerful about whatever engages our thought—that’s not obtrusive mental healing for someone else, that is healing me, that is healing my own thought. Just don’t see what the patient thinks she has. Know that God didn’t send it to her. Then when you approach that individual, you’re doing it not from the standpoint of, “She’s got something,” but from the standpoint of “She’s God’s child and God only made perfection.” Then when you say something to her, it will more likely reach her heart. What I say in cases like that is God loves you and prayer can do wonders. The individual will tell you how much she wants to hear from you. If the individual agrees and wants to know more, then you can talk more. And you can get to the point where you say, “Here’s a book that has brought much healing to me, and you might read it and see if it doesn’t uplift your thought” and then offer a Science and Health. If you don’t feel that’s appropriate, then you can just remind that individual that God is very close to her, and God is very powerful, and that prayer can do wonders. And then just provide whatever support and love that you can.

spirituality.com host: Thank you. Carol from Wisconsin is asking a sort of related question. She says: Are you aware of any helpful advice that Mrs. Eddy may have given to a student who was not able to heal a case?

Marian: Well, not being there and hearing Mrs. Eddy, I’ve got to rely on her writings. In her writings it is so clear that persistence does win the case. Persistence. Her advice to students was, Never give up. Her advice to students as far as I know from her published writings was always to love and to love more and to never abandon the love—don’t give it up.

There’s an interesting case—I don’t know whether to mention it or not—but it is published because it’s been in the early, early Sentinels, and I can’t tell you which one. A man was a Christian Science practitioner, which is someone who engages in the work of spiritual healing on a full-time basis. He had a patient that had come to him with a case of addiction to morphine. He had come out of the Civil War, because morphine was used indiscriminately by the physicians, not knowing its deadly side-effect, and they used it for a painkiller during the Civil War. So here was this man who’d been in the Civil War and he was addicted to morphine. The practitioner went to Mrs. Eddy and said, “I’m not making any progress on this. I can’t heal it. And Mrs. Eddy’s answer was: “That’s because both practitioner and patient are believing there was a war.” Now, to the human experience, of course there was a war. But the fact is, was there a war to God? God knows nothing of discord and dismay in the human experience. To him, it is nothing. And His understanding of the complete harmony of the creation that He has made is what heals. I think Mary Baker Eddy’s advice to anyone who’s having a problem with healing is: Stick to the Truth. Let the Truth do the work and don’t give up.

I’ll tell you one more thing. I know I’m making this answer too long, but I like to make two columns to make sure that I know what my job is and I’m not trying to do God’s job. For instance, Jesus gave us the full statement of healing prayer in just five words: “Ye shall know the truth” (John 8:32), the truth will make you free. So on my part—on my column, I say my job is to know the truth. And on God’s part of the column, God’s column, His work is to make us free. The Truth, or God, will make us free. He’ll make sure we don’t try to do God’s work for Him. I’m just going to be knowing the Truth about the patient.

spirituality.com host: Thank you. Chris, writing from somewhere in the US says: Sometimes a difficulty seems so aggressive that practicing your spirituality as you put it, seems to take a second place to just needing to argue for a healing. How can we break the mesmerism that just makes us want to argue instead of to grow?

Marian: Yes, that’s a good question. I like to put myself some place way back in that day that must of been an awful day for the disciples. It was the day when Jesus was put on the cross. Think of the states and stages of consciousness surrounding that cross. There were people there who were grieving at the foot of the cross. There were people who were wandering sadly away—and I take that to mean they were sadly moving away from his teachings, too. There were people who were hiding behind closed doors for fear. There were people there of all different states and stages of consciousness. There was only one, apparently, who was sticking with God, who was sticking with that First Commandment. To the extent that that one could say, “Forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Now out of all those states and stages of thought, which one would be your way-shower? Wouldn’t it be the one who was sticking with the truth? When error or sickness seems very aggressive, I know from my own experience, that’s just the time to keep thought so focused on God that the thought is completely at one with God. And God will do the rest. Our job is to stick with Him.

spirituality.com host: All right, well Jan from California has a question that you’ll enjoy answering, I think. If we don’t live in the material body, then what is this material body and how to we pray to heal it?

Marian: That is a good question. The image and likeness of God does not need a material body to live. The image and likeness of God lives, and moves, and has his being in Spirit, in Mind, in Soul. The material body which you call your body is a belief that there’s another mind, that there is a mind which is mortal. Mortal means dead. The material body and mortal mind are one. And we have to decide every moment where we are. Are we really in a material body? Or are we in a spiritual atmosphere of divine Love and its power? And that means when we’re working with healing are we really trying to heal a material body? Why would Spirit do that?

What we’re really doing in the healing practice of Christianity is making apparent that which God has made. So we’re making apparent the spiritual man and his perfection and his power and his peace and his joy and his beauty. So be careful what you’re doing when you’re healing, to think that you have to make a material body better, that’s what doctors do. God love ‘em. That’s not what we’re doing. That puts us on a competition with the medical profession and we never intend to be there. What we’re really doing is bringing out the spiritual reality of what God has made. We’re making that apparent.

There is a term for trying to make matter better when we’re healing and that term is quackery. If you have a Science and Health, you can turn to page 395 and get better acquainted with what quackery is. Quackery is thinking that what you see is real and then trying to change it. But the true sense of spiritual healing is staying with God, seeing what He gives us as real, and making this apparent in our lives.

I’ll give you an example of that. Jesus healed a withered arm in an instant. Now, wouldn’t it take time for that withered arm to get better? And for it to grow, and for the blood to course through it, and the tissues to grow, and the muscles and the bones to grow—wouldn’t it take time to do that? But it didn’t. Immediately the arm was “whole, like as the other” (Matt. 12:13). Then what did he do? He replaced that false sense of a material body, or a material arm, with the true idea that God was feeding him all the time. It looked like an instantaneous healing, but what it was really doing was bringing out what God had already provided for that man—the perfect body, the Christly body.

spirituality.com host: One of the things I wanted to read to you is from Barry in California. It’s: Can you share some thoughts about healing an irregular heartbeat that sometimes comes on all of a sudden? It is very disturbing and it has been going on and off for many years. I would like to see it healed permanently.

Marian: Well, so would I, Barry. In Miscellaneous Writings—this is a book called Prose Works, and it’s the writings of Mary Baker Eddy other than Science and Health—there’s a question. The question on page 50 in that book is: “Do you believe in change of heart?” And in that answer it talks about changing heart in a way that’s changing your thought—changing your whole concept of how you think about yourself. It says: “The human affections need to be changed from self to benevolence and love for God and man; changed to having but one God and loving Him supremely, and helping our brother man. This change of heart is essential to Christianity, and will have its effect physically as well as spiritually, healing disease.” I love that statement about a “change of heart” because it speaks to our emotions, it speaks to our thought, before it speaks to the physical organ called “heart” but it reaches that physical organ and changes it. You can be healed permanently of that condition or whatever you’re dealing with by changing your thought about it. God didn’t give anybody a permanent condition of an erratic heartbeat. He didn’t do it. Therefore, we don’t have to consider it as having any power or any reality. But we do have to address it. We never ignore it. We look right at it, and know that God has given us the ability, the love, the compassion, and the power to heal it.

spirituality.com host: Now I think we’re going to have time for two questions. This one is from Trish in South Africa. She says: I’m praying about a challenge at the moment which apparently requires me to be patient before the healing becomes evident. Unfortunately, it is affecting my day-to-day life which is frustrating, and I often entertain fearful thoughts of, “What if this is never healed,” etc. What I don’t understand is: If matter does not exist, and we are purely spiritual, then surely there is nothing to heal. What is my part in the healing? What is required of me? And if I do just hand it over, how do I find the absolute conviction in order to do this?

Marian: Well, you know, we’ve been trying for centuries to heal these things through material methods and we’re still trying. It hasn’t really gotten to the point where we’ve got any guarantees that anything will heal. So, to me, it’s always been a matter of spiritual strength that heals. And we are patient. We’re patient with ourselves. We don’t have to be patient with the sickness, but we’re patient with ourselves and our journey Spiritward. And as we move forward in a way that is waiting on God. “Wait patiently,” Science and Health tells us, “for divine Love to move upon the waters of mortal mind, and form the perfect concept” (p. 454). What we have to do is change our concept of ourselves. We needn’t be impatient about that. We can change our concept of ourselves slowly or quickly, it depends on us.

Here’s a question for you—for the questioner—will impatience heal it? The patience with ourselves and our journey forward is a God-given quality that extends from Love to patients. In fact, there’s a chapter in Science and Health that talks about this kind of situation. It’s called, “Animal Magnetism Unmasked.” It’s talking about that—what seems to be something that just holds on to us and that we just don’t seem to have the ability to break loose from it. It’s not true. We can break loose from it. It can’t hold on to us and we don’t hold on to it. The very last sentence in that chapter says: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,” patience—the word is longsuffering, but that doesn’t mean suffering a long time, it means patience. Then it gives us some more spiritual qualities that ties right in to the spirituality that we’ve been talking about. And then it says, “against such there is no law” (p. 106). So think of that. There is no law against patience. There’s no law against spiritual healing. God has provided us all with that spiritual sense of spiritual goodness, with that spirituality that replaces—it doesn’t improve us, but it does improve our thoughts about ourselves. It’s that spirituality that gives us the power that God has.

spirituality.com host: Well, you’ve just about answered this question that is going to be—absolutely has to be—our last one, but I know there were lots of other questions and I’m sorry we couldn’t get to all of them. This is from Sue in Massachusetts and the individual says: What scares me most is the idea that the body reflects whatever is held in thought, making it seem as if we’re doomed to failure if we are unable to reach the point where there is absolutely no fear of, or belief in, matter. How do we combat the fear that we lack sufficient conviction to experience healing? And I wanted to add that there have been some questions about people who have asked about how to get rid of doubt, and as you were mentioning, discouragement is another one. So there have been questions along this line about how to make sure our thoughts are uplifted enough in addition to this one that we lack sufficient conviction to experience healing.

Marian: Well, I can tell the questioner that she’s looking at the wrong Sue today. There’s only one, and God has made you. God has made you in His likeness. Do you think that the likeness of Mind understands enough? Do you think that the full representation of Mind has wisdom? That’s what man is. And when we look at man as God has made him, we’re bit by bit, thought by thought, we’re losing that concept of ourselves as being a mixture of good and bad, and sometimes we don’t know which one’s winning. Discouragement and despair are not Godlike qualities and we reject them. They are not coming from God.

Jesus often said when he was healing, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.” He said that to the woman who was hemorrhaging for twelve years, and had spent all her living on physicians. And he said when she was healed, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.” Why didn’t he say, My faith has done this? Because he was looking at the woman God made, and that woman, that male and female of God’s creating does have faith, does have understanding. And he was seeing it.

Sue, I would recommend that you see in yourself those qualities of love and understanding and wisdom and strength that God has given you, and don’t get them mixed up with the counterfeit concept of Sue that doesn’t have those qualities. The two should not be confounded. There’s only one of you and that’s the one God made, and you can be sure that it has encouragement and courage and strength and understanding. You need to develop and nurture those qualities.

spirituality.com host: Thank you, Marian, you have just been a champ to stay with us this long.

Marian: Oh, it’s my pleasure. What fun it’s been.

spirituality.com host: Do you have any final comments you’d like to leave us with?

Marian: Well, I think we’ve covered pretty much of everything, but I’ll tell you this. Spirituality, which is what we’ve been talking about, is consistent spiritual thinking. It’s not like a yo-yo that one day is up with Christ and filled with joy and peace and the next day is down in the dumps. It is consistent, spiritual thinking and it comes to us from God, so we can trust it. The spiritual qualities of love and peace are like a deep river, like pure water that washes and purifies us and sweeps away the debris of fear and discouragement. Spirituality is the kingdom of heaven within us and that cultivation of that spirituality is what opens our thought to that kingdom of heaven, and it is for every one of us right at hand.

spirituality.com host: Oh, thank you so very much, Marian.

Marian: You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure.

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